Louise Erdrich - Original Fire - Selected and New Poems

of snow, the snow absolving human presence.

Star. Failing light. I praise you,

as I’m sitting here, praise you fervently,

and without hope, every day.

The first waves rushed in, immaculate and foaming.

The child was given up to love.

Pressed deeply against the sound of the world,

she breathed the dark spores

of earth, slept underneath the twelve-branched heart.

Let us go down into the earth every night.

Let us bite down,

let us chew the bitter wood to paste

as deer in their winter yards circulate, stripping

everything into themselves

until they drift out,

in spring, wise and ravenous.

I lie down in the grass, watching, and when the coyote turns

her ass to the wind, looks at me across her shoulder,

that is when we regard each other,

as the snow bleeds white around the base of Sweetgrass.

You are everything. There is nowhere

I do not praise you.

In bed, in the body.

You rise toward me in the bones

of my wife, my husband, my lover.

Paging through the white flesh, the black, the brown,

which we wear as we dance the skin dance

Someone please!

Remove my beer-can vest, my skin of vinyl sheet music!

Speak from the water, speak from the fucking.

I praise you in the body out of the body.

Ash I must become in new rain descending.

Child, dear raven’s heart, new messenger.

Hammer of love, hammer of time,

self I’ve killed you in myself,

again, again, dragging you to light by the tail,

pounding you to one thin ribbon.

Now I release you,

blue and coiling in the simple world.

How sad I have become walking in my heavy shoes.

You will have to kill me, you will have to be my body.

Our love like all love is magical failure.

Perfect light, manuscript of ions.

I write your praises

on my own skin

with the stylus of a sharpened nail.

I wake in the blue hours once again,

my whole life spilling through me,

as loons pour

the cold green tea of their laughter

across the rose-slabbed lakes of Ontario.

I am one thing. I am nothing you can name.

I pray in the woods, begging to be taken,

the way leaves and stones are

whirled into your rushing mouth.

River of snow, river of twinned carp,

Sky of three holes, sky of white paper.

I praise you the way shadows

of deer move beyond the cut lawn

stripping everything into them, flowers, bark,

the frail blossoms of the poke, the weeds,

yew trees, cedar, lythrum, tender new labia of phlox.

Shadow of my need, shadow of hunger,

shadow infinite and made of gesture,

my god, my leaf,

graceful, ravenous, moving in endless circles

as the sweet seeds hang waxen yellow in the maple.

Otto brought one sister from that town

they never talk about. His father shook

one great red fist, a bludgeon, in the air

behind them as dry sparks released the wheels.

I pictured him, still standing there, now shrunk—

a carved root pickling in its own strong juice.

They speak his name and wipe it from their lips.

Proud Hilda hides his picture

in a drawer with underskirts.

Tall Hilda sniffed and twisted that gold chain

my Otto gave her. Other, lesser men

have gifted her with more impressive things.

She keeps them in a drawer with towels and sheets.

I came upon a sentimental locket,

embossed with words, initials interfixed

within the breasts of dour, molting swans.

Proud Hilda cracked it open,

smiled, and clicked it shut.

How many men had begged her heavy hand

I do not know. I think I loved her too

in ways that I am not sure how to tell—

I reached one day to gather back her hair:

wild marigold. I touched one hidden ear

and drew my fingers, burning, from the stone

that swung a cold light from the polished lobe.

Tall Hilda took my hand in hers and kissed

the palm, and closed that mark inside my fist.

She lived alone and thickened in that town,

refusing company for weeks on end.

We left food at her door; she took it in;

her dull lamp deepened as the night wore on.

I went to her when everything was wrong.

We sat all evening talking children, men.

She laughed at me, and said it was my ruin.

My giving till I dropped.

Live blood let down the drain.

I never let her know how those words cut

me serious — her questioning my life. One night

a slow thing came, provoked by weariness,

to cram itself up every slackened nerve;

as if my body were a whining hive

and each cell groaning with a sweet, thick lead—

I turned and struck at Otto in our bed;

all night, all night the poison, till I swarmed

back empty to his cold

and dreaming arms.

All night I am the doe, breathing

his name in a frozen field,

the small mist of the word

drifting always before me.

And again he has heard it

and I have gone burning

to meet him, the jacklight

fills my eyes with blue fire;

the heart in my chest

explodes like a hot stone.

Then slung like a sack

in the back of his pickup,

I wipe the death scum

from my mouth, sit up laughing

and shriek in my speeding grave.

Safely shut in the garage,

when he sharpens his knife

and thinks to have me, like that,

I come toward him,

a lean gray witch

through the bullets that enter and dissolve.

I sit in his house

drinking coffee till dawn

and leave as frost reddens on hubcaps,

crawling back into my shadowy body.

All day, asleep in clean grasses,

I dream of the one who could really wound me.

Not with weapons, not with a kiss, not with a look.

Not even with his goodness.

If a man was never to lie to me. Never lie me.

I swear I would never leave him.

At one time your touches were clothing enough.

Within these trees now I am different.

Now I wear the woods.

I lower a headdress of bent sticks and secure it.

I strap to myself a breastplate of clawed, roped bark.

I fit the broad leaves of sugar maples

to my hands, like mittens of blood.

Now when I say come ,

and you enter the woods,

hunting some creature like the woman I was,

I surround you.

Light bleeds from the clearing. Roots rise.

Fluted molds burn blue in the falling light,

and you also know

the loneliness that you taught me with your body.

When you lie down in the grave of a slashed tree,

I cover you, as I always did.

Only this time you do not leave.

Under ledge, under tar, under fill

under curved blue stone of doorsteps,

under the aggregate of lakebed rock,

under loss and under hard words,

under steamrollers

under your heart,

it doesn’t matter. They can live forever.